tonight... bookmeat...!

for those of you in los angeles, tonight is the night of a wonderful silent auction to benefit side street projects. while i don't tend to publicize events on the blog too much, i thought the idea of the auction was a great one. instead of asking artists to donate artwork, the organizers invited artists to donate a book that was somehow meaningful to them, to inscribe the book, and to include a letter or some "surprise", adding some secret insight to the buyer. they encouraged artists to donate their own copy of the book, perhaps dog eared and notated... tickets are very reasonable!

i had a pretty difficult time selecting a single book, but there is one that i have used numerous times towards my own work, and since i had 3 copies between home and the studio, it seemed a good fit. (i believe the books will be auctioned without the artist being known, so i won't reveal the title of mine!).

as i was holding the book in my hand to inscribe, i decided to add one extra path for the next owner, underlining a word or phrase on each page, suggesting a poem of stepping stones through the text... here's a short bit of it...

... and my eye sadly leaves the roof,
i am going to carry it with me over the mountains.

wind drifts across me, beyond me blue.
listen, from the hives and blossoms
rocks gently as a dream in the night
together in the moist flight of clouds.

blue lakes, and listening
with hundreds of nuances. my yearning
softly once again.

wandering without any special direction,
we lightly scatter:
the pasture, birds, and butterflies.

luminously
around me, a magic circle glows.

the land, it had trumpets.
the bridge sang in me, and echoed
what the sky said
in the moonlight curving gently away.

tenderly with inward, beloved things
ringing the bell
in my tongue, on the souls of my feet.

info here

gomringer's constellations...

of all poetic structures based upon the word, the constellation is the simplest. it disposes its groups of words as if they were clusters of stars.

the constellation is a system, it is also a playground with definite boundaries. the poet sets it all up. he designs the play-ground as a field-of-force & suggests its possible workings. the reader, the new reader, accepts it in the spirit of play, then plays with it.

with each constellation something new comes into the world. each constellation is a reality in itself & not a poem about some other thing.

the constellation is a challenge, it is also an invitation.

eugene gomringer, constellations, 1963 (translation by jerome rothenberg, 1967, something else press.)

when mathews mentions the written word and the unwritten world...

if, as IC (calvino) said the other night, description is an activity in which the writer can begin to resolve the irreconcilability of the written word and the unwritten world, is there a hierarchy of preferences of things to be described? should one pursue the description of objects that are more and more devoid of salient characteristics, for instance the cigar box given me by the j and r tobacco company, a parallelepiped of the barest sort? or should one aim at portraying objects that are perpetually in flux or, better, that are transformed by our very description of them, like this page? what else could be so transformed? a beautiful woman tattooed with an account of her diminishing beauty - but she wouldn't then be truly something else: simply a woman being treated like a page. experience itself, past or present: as we represent it in words, it is assuredly modified, it's reduced, it's stripped of what is virtually an infinite ambiguity of interpretation and given only one version of itself - it becomes that other object which is the set of words of our description. ponge's genius - or part of it - is that he so immediately quits the oyster or cigarette he's describing for other objects to which he metaphorically compares it that the original object and our access to it are left unencumbered by what he has made of it. all his descriptions should carry april fool's day as the date of their inspiration.

harry mathews, 20 lines a day, 1988

when saroyan asked if writers are worth listening to...

the january 1955 issue of high fidelity magazine featured a beautiful photograph of william saroyan, recording himself reading one of his own works (jim dandy), in his malibu home, with a view of the ocean. the photograph is connected to a story in the magazine where saroyan discusses the "value" of being able to listen to writers read their own works through recordings, and specifically LP recordings.

the bulk of the article is not super interesting, but there a few gems, including saroyan's affirmation of one of my own stronger beliefs towards making recordings with humble gear...

"my recording for columbia was done on my own machine in my own home in malibu. the machine isn't much, but there are good machines, and i am in favor of this procedure for writers, rather than the procedure which involves recording studios, technicians, signals, signals off, and the rest of it. technical deficiencies are balanced by naturalness. i tend to believe that the ideal record will be more than just a straight reading of a given piece of writing. it will be something of the writer himself. if this were not so, if the reading were the important thing, then it would be in order for a professional reader, or actor to attend to the matter."

when chairs appear in different cities...

yesterday at the flea market, i picked up these two cabinet cards, because of the chair. as you can see it appears in both photographs. even though it's kind of an interesting chair, it wouldn't have been necessary to procure the photographs until i noticed that one image was taken in chicago, and the other in st. louis.

as difficult as travel must've been around 1870, i would imagine it being even tougher for a chair. i'm not sure if there's more to the story, other than the fact that face of the boy in the solo image, and the girl on the left in the other image have incredibly similar facial features.

like the photograph of the woman and the victrola i posted last week, the chair here does begin to feel like a surrogate for a missing person; and perhaps, because no one is actually sitting on it in either picture, there is a family spirit taking up the chair-sitting-space invisibly.

perhaps this invisible presence was felt by the others in the photographs; and that the subjects, along with the photographer, attempted to photographically capture this ghost, by travelling to different cities, and posing with different family members. it would seem that every time they, and the chair, had their photograph taken, they would be filled with hope that the phantom would somehow appear, sitting on the chair comfortably, within the photographic image that eventually appeared upon the paper...

if that was the case, then what we see here, is simply a failed attempt to make the invisible, visible.

when the camera is facing a mirror and covered in paper...

i recently picked up this cyanotype of herbert s. smith. it is a self portrait, taken on july 4, 1890, created by pointing the camera into a mirror. smith owned the "smith wheel chair concern"(not sure what that was, but it would definitely make a great band name), which, at the time, was at 120 william st. in new york.

as you can see from the detail, the camera is covered in white paper. i'm not sure of the reason for this "modification" but it makes the visible parts of the camera look a bit like a small constellation. the photograph came out of a scrapbook, with a ton of notation on each shot, (which is how we know this is a self portrait and shot into a mirror), but he did not mention the white paper covering. (if anyone out there has an idea about this, i'd love to hear from you.)

while my photograph collection mainly dances around the idea of music and listening, i've found myself lately also buying certain photographs, like this one, that have nothing to do with music. as i look at this more recent obsession with images that seem to have nothing in common (other than their non-music-ness), i try, as always, to figure out how they might be connected, so that i can somehow begin to understand, as well as to articulate, at least to myself, what i might be looking for, and to have a sense of what i'm "building" through this secondary arm of the collection, as i'm convinced there is a thread, or two, or twenty...

as for smith's self portrait, the thing that makes it extraordinary for me, is that we are seeing the photographer/camera's view and the subject's view at the same time. smiths eyes seem to be keyed on the spot on the mirror that the lens would also be "seeing". in looking directly at smith's eyes and the camera's lens, you can really feel that "V" shaped line bouncing from eyes to mirror to lens; and of course, this image is as it would've been seen if there was a lens, or an eye, in that exact point in the mirror where smith's eyes and lens' gaze met...

when poets were like baseball players too...

a few weeks ago, i posted the artwork for a frank lloyd wright bubble gum card that was part of a set of famous americans from the early 1960's. a few days ago i remembered another bubble gum card anomaly... this 1934 "sky birds" bubble gum card of gabriel d'annunzio, pictured as a famous aviator, but on the back also referred to as the "poet flyer".

to the best of my knowledge, like wright the architect, d'annunzio was the only poet to appear on a bubble gum card.

when i discovered the card, years ago, i thought the poet simply shared a name with a famous WWI italian fighter, but d'annunzio seems to have led quite a complex life. the back of his short story collection "nocturne and five tales of love and death", tells the reader he was "flamboyant, unquestionably brave, eloquent, seductive - an inspirer and leader of men, astonishingly successful with women" (not exactly the usual bio of a poet born in 1863 and published by academic and university presses...).

i first came upon his work in the mid-1980's through the marlboro press, who published the short story collection mentioned above, as well as many great works in translation. it was through marlboro that i discovered writers like hermann broch and hans fallada. d'annunzio's short stories were great, but i remember having a deeper relationship with his dark novel of failed love, "the triumph of death".

according to the backs of both books, d'annunzio's work was championed by a number of great writers, including james joyce, eugenio montale, andre malraux, and paul valery, which probably means one could also add the phrase "writer's writer" to his already swollen biography.

here's a large fragment of a one of d'annunzio's longer poems, that i particularly like because of its relationship to listening and nature sounds...:

hush. on the edges
of the woods i can't
hear words
you say, human words;
but i hear newer words,
that drops of water and leaves speak
far away.
listen. it's raining
from the scattering clouds.
it's raining on the
brackish, burnt-up tamarisks,
it's raining on the
scaly, bristling pines,
it's raining on the divine
myrtles,
on the broom trees gleaming
with their clumps of flowers,
on the matty junipers
and their sweet-smelling pips,
it's raining on our sylvan
faces,
it's raining on our bare
hands,
on our thin
clothes,
on the fresh thoughts
which the mind uncovers
in her new freshness,
on the lovely fable
that yesterday
enchanted you, and today enchants me,

can you hear? the rain is falling
on the solitary
greenness
with a crackling that hangs
and varies in the air
with the thickness and the sparseness
of the greening.
listen. in reply
to the crying, the song of
cicadas
which the south-wind crying
cannot frighten;
nor can the ashy sky.
and the pine tree
has its sound, and the myrtle
has its sound, the juniper has
still another, diverse
instruments
under fingers without number.
and we
are immersed in forest
spirit,
living of wood livingness;
and your longing face
is wet with rain
like a leaf,
and your hair
smells like
shining broom flowers,
o earthly creature
name
hermione.

listen, listen. the chord
of airy cicadas
little by little
hushes
under the growing cry;
but now a song mixes in,
more raucous
than what rises from below,
from wet, distant shade.
hollower and hoarser
it grows weak, it dies.
alone one note
still trembles, dies,
rises, trembles, dies.
the voice of the sea cannot be heard.
and now on all the leafy branches
is heard to stream in torrents
the silver rain
that cleans,
the vast outpouring that varies
the thickness
and the sparseness
of the greening.
listen.
air's daughter
is silent; but the distant daughter
of the mud,
the frog,
is singing from the deepest shadows,
who knows where, who knows where!
and it's raining on your lashes,
hermione.

when bunnies and clowns can be scary...

click here to listen to a home recording from the 1940's, also related to halloween...

her mister's voice

as anyone who reads the blog regularly knows, i collect early photographs related to music, and am partial to images of records and record players. when a fellow collector led me to this photograph on ebay, it was of course mainly because of the prominent image of a giant "morning glory" victrola horn in the picture. i thought the dealer wanted a bit too much money for a somewhat morose looking old woman and a flowery speaker horn until i noticed the framed portrait hanging on the wall behind the subjects.

this framed photograph, probably a wedding portrait, clearly pictures the same woman, quite a bit younger, along with a gent, whom i would assume must've been her husband. the fact that we see the woman in the photograph twice, in different stages of life, is quite incredible. it is through these two representations of time, within a single photograph, that we can compare the woman as she was in youth with the woman she is in life, as photographed... you can compare the two faces and follow the passage of time.

for those who may not know the story of the original victor dog mascot and the ad line "his master's voice", it referred to the idea that a dog's owner could record his own voice for posterity, and after he was dead, his voice would reproduce so clearly when played on a victrola, that the dog (whose head is slightly bent in confusion) would believe he was hearing his master speaking to him from the dead.

in light of this, it certainly is no great leap to imagine that the relationship between the earlier wedding picture and the latter image of the woman, "partnered" with the victrola instead of her husband, suggests the recordings and playback mechanism as a surrogate for what has passed through life and is now (at the time the photograph was taken) gone. there she sits alone in a chair accompanied by a mute gramophone, which may or may not comfort her in her loss and loneliness. her hairstyle seems to remain the same, but her "love" is clearly missing.

certainly the look on her face doesn't do anything to dispel the feeling of sadness, and the images of her, young and old in the same photograph, seem to speak about the fragility of life - as if at some point there could simply be a photograph of the couple on the wall, and two victrolas, silent and still, in the forefront...

when harmony is found on a harmonica...

a small poem by rene' char...

"small harp of the larch trees,
on the buttress made of moss and growing flagstones,
-edge of the forests where the cloud breaks-
resonating note of space, in which i believe"

rene' char
(translated by robert bly)

when a pedagogical blackboard suggests poetry...

light. logic.
hilite
cores
turnings.

turning
s.
core
s.
hilite.
logic.
light.

light.
logic.
o. hi-lite.
core.
s.
turning.
s.

li-ght lo-
gic. o
hi-li-
te. core-
s. turn-
ing-s.

ligh
tlo
gic
oh
hi
lite
core
es
tur
ning
es.

sturning
score
elite.
agaric
light.

slight.
logis (logics) locusts.
o hittite cores.
turning
South.

turning hilite core turning
o logic, o light

light-o-logic.
o high light's core.
o turn
o turning
o turnings.

stern, yearnings
scored core turning
hill - night, ill-
ogic light
oh, oh, oh, oh
burnings, stored
stones
in scores of turnings
and tunings.

tuning spores
hills
ice
logos
flight.

slight
locus
high
slight
focus
high
slight
spare
spurning
doors
draining
raining
staining
straining
turning
scraping
sore
elite
slight
light high
locus
sight
lit
light.

lamp
order
foreground
core
transmuted

li-lo-hi-co-tu
gh-gi-li-re-rn
t-c-te-s-in
gs.

the light amidst
the logic
of highlights
cores of darkness
within
ever turning.

sgninrut seroc
etilih
o cigol
thgil.

cores
hilite
light
logic
o
turnings

cc
ee
ggg
hh
iiiii
lll
nn
ooo
rr
ss
ttt
u

ghoost
cchug
grin
stone
liilt
reliic

ghilt.
cgilo.
o.
ehiilt.
ceor.
s.
ginnurt.
s

turnings hi
cores light
logic lite
o.
o.
o.

(image: blackboard with notation related to another teacher's drawing class photographed with my phone as found...)

when the mind's eye and the eye's eye play with memory...

i picked up this beautiful albumen photograph of an ice formation in the sea at the flea market on sunday (i would highly recommend clicking to see in a larger size!). as i was looking at the photograph, deciding whether or not to buy it, it began to suggest a small painting by arthur dove, which in my mind's eye felt as if it had some sort of formal visual equivalent to the image in the photograph.

when i returned home, i spent a half hour or so trying to find my dove books, and finally uncovered frederick s. wight's book on dove from 1958. this book, which i discovered as a student, in a library in paris, many years ago, was my first introduction to dove's work, and the images, as well as some of dove's own writings, planted the first deep seeds of abstraction within me. it was also in wight's book that i first saw a color image of dove's 1910 painting, abstraction no. 2, which was part of a series of 6 very small paintings, purported to be the first truly abstract paintings made in america.

when i managed to find the image in wight's book i was surprised at how little the photograph and the painting had in common (other than their scale, as i have seen abstraction no. 2 in reality). i had somehow imagined within my mind's eye that the form within dove's small painting had similar tentacle-like appendages growing out of it, and similarly connected those iceberg horns to another of dove's works, which was totally devoid of any relationship to this photograph at all...

in the second image of dove's painting, just above, i have flipped it over, to force the painting into a literal visual relationship conversation with the photograph. of course, the black outline does suggest devilish horns pointing upwards, but the idea of the necessity of flipping the painting to make the connections work becomes too forced, and suggests, rather presumptuously, that dove's work must conform to my mind and an old anonymous photograph, rather than that i must work to get closer to whatever connections exist between two things as they are.

certainly the main form in dove's painting (seen right way up), and the ice form in the photograph, occupy a similar subject/ground relationship, as well as both inhabit a similar amount of pictorial real estate. also the larger black area in the midst of dove's shape certainly corresponds to the window-like cavity in the ice form... but within these few simple, and relatively meaningless, connections, i wonder if this whole situation should even be thought about in relation my eyes at all.

i would like to think of a "connective feeling" as something being birthed from simple gut reaction that moves vibrationally towards my emotions, and perhaps, also working a at times upon my memories - memories that perhaps relate dove's colors to some moment of visited sea, or perhaps, in relation to a time in my life, or to some object or image that holds parts of dove's abstraction and the iceberg within it.

perhaps my insides can sense or see some thing or idea that suggests a sturdy bright pink twine binding these two things together -not just in feeling, but through logic that could be articulated with clarity... but surely, this is not the case. to my "knowing" self, it is really a matter of being just out of reach, where some ethereal and stubborn string, is so invisible to my own eyes, that whatever path i would need to walk to come upon such conclusions, could not be found.

as always, it within this space of distance and disconnect that i find to be the richest. in these spaces, these two images feel connected, regardless of whether or not i can articulate such connections in detail. the truth is that i'm still enamored with the way an image can make one person feel happy or another sad, or how one seems to be good, while another is somehow bad. our response to images is quite subjective, and images generally contain such a wonderful ability to confuse things inside of us - acting as triggers of potential, towards self awareness and at the same time, creating a confused and unresolved situation that one can only really come to terms with through a kind of letting go of rational thinking - to see these things as double sided, one as it is in the world, and the other as it feels inside of us and how it plays upon our memory and mind. this convoluted flux is proof that parts of our insides are continually at work, even though we are seldom allowed to access their secrets.

when i try to compare dove's painting and the iceberg photograph, their connections are strongest when i am not thinking, and in a state of unknowing. (and so it must be that it is in that place, within the mind, where one of these two similar, yet dissimilar, things is erased, so that it can become different in mind than it is in reality - transformed, translated, or transcribed - suddenly feeling closer to its sibling in appearance inside, than it is as seen on the outside, only with eyes).

this feeling of connection, outside of logic or visual evidence, is nearly impossible to describe; although perhaps like rorschach blots, some therapist could see in my need for these two images to suggest each other in an almost symbiotic visual relationship, a relationship to some psychological state, a feeling towards a parent, or a key to my own secret desires...

five recent tintype finds...

this thursday night... and free

very excited to be invited to perform at an event for the closing of doug aitken's recent installation - migration - at regen projects gallery.

the even will include 5 live improvised soundtracks to doug's installation film, which features an array of exotic, domestic, and aquatic animals in pristine motel environments.

i have known doug for years, and have contributed sound to a number of his installations, and we have collaborated in the past on sound works and an edition, but this will be the first time i will work with an entire film of his.

peformances are 7-9, i have no idea what time i will be playing... some other stellar performers on the bill as well.

the event is free, and here is the info...



















Doug Aitken: Migration Happening
Thursday, October 15 7-9pm
Featuring live improvisational music by:
Lucky Dragons
White Rainbow
Steve Roden
The Urxed
Nudge
and friends...

RSVP required as space is limted
RSVP to mickimeng@regenprojects.com

when architects were like baseball players...

in 1962, the topps company, manufacturer of baseball cards and bazooka bubble gum, created a "non-sport" bubble gum card set called famous americans, featuring numerous personalities from american history. one of the stranger inclusions was a card featuring frank lloyd wright.

it is easy to imagine kids coveting a sandy koufax or a mickey mantle, and perhaps even a card with someone like george washington; but i would imagine when a kid, in 1962, opened a pack of bubble gum cards and discovered a card with frank lloyd wright on it, he simply sighed, and thought "huh?"...

seeing as every young boy has dreamt of one day seeing himself on a baseball card, i kind of feel sorry for wright, as the set containing his image hit the dime stores and newsstands 3 years after he'd died.

at one point, maybe 8-10 years ago, the topps company began to sell their own archive of original art for numerous sports and non-sport sets. having been a voracious card collector when i was a kid, i was constantly watching to see what they might pull out and sell, hoping to win a piece of art of some sacred collected object i had as a kid. unfortunately not much from that era came out, and most of what did, was insanely expensive.

while it came from a set that was released a few years before i was born, i was intrigued by the wright art, because i believe he was the only architect to ever appear on a bubble gum card; but because there are a ton of folks who collect wright related ephemera, i couldn't imagine being able to buy it... i figured it would sell for crazy money.

fortunately, the bubble gum card collecting community had little love for architects, and not another soul was interested; and so, i managed to win it for a song.

the artwork, and the card which was eventually printed from it, is a rare object, merging bubble gum, baseball cards, and architecture. it is a kind of collision two of my childhood and post-childhood ( i would hesitate to use the word "adult") obsessions. the funny thing is that if i had been born a few years earlier, and was old enough to be buying baseball cards in 1962, i can imagine opening a pack of gum cards expecting to see a ballplayer, and pulling out this card with wright on it, and caring more about the piece of bubble gum...

before lawrence welk's musical spoons...

if you are around my age and grew up in southern california and watched cartoons and wonderama on sunday mornings you surely saw the commercials for lawrence welk's musical spoons; and if you ever wandered over to thrifty's, you encountered on a toy rack, a pair of thin metal spoons joined in a blue plastic handle, that when "played" made a pretty strange percussive clicking sound (very good perhaps for making "clip clop" horse walking sounds...).

i've been collecting music photographs for a long while now, and one of the exciting things about these images, beyond their aesthetic pleasure and wonder, is that there are many instruments i have yet to encounter. one such recent discovery was this first photograph i have ever seen of someone playing a form of "musical spoons", and i must say the fact that he is actually playing them makes it quite special.

addendum: an astute and musicologically inclined airforms regular, jeremey, pointed out that these are indeed "bones", with a link posted in the comments for this post towards a wikipedia article, which also led me to a pretty wonderful video of someone playing bones along with a banjo that you might want to check out here.

concrete poetry...

anonymous snapshot, circa 1945...

live free music...

two FREE music events in the los angeles area this weekend...

friday, october 2, 7:30 - 11:00pm, domizil & icst zurich, at LACE, 6522 hollywood blvd., evening of live sound performances & video projections including a gaggle of swiss artists and a few locals: marcus maeder, bernd schurer, jasch, mem1, and myself. i will perform an improvised work based mostly on the sound of a small "voice-o-graph" record from the 1940's...

saturday, october 3, 5pm - 10 pm, soundwalk, 60+ artists working with sound in various forms of performance and installation, at various locations downtown long beach, ca - FREE - located in the area encompassed by broadway, atlantic avenue, ocean boulevard, and elm street with a sound corridor on 1st street that will connect the east village and pine avenue. i will be presenting a small installation related to rimbaud's vowels in memory of terry fox...

hold your hold and swing like thunder...

here are a series of drawings from 1951 by frank colton illustrating various square dance positions. at the library book sale a few weeks ago, the square dancing book was in a box leaning against a book about dances in ancient egypt, and while i have little interest in either subject the fact that they were touching and 50 cents each suggested i take them home and someday perhaps find some connective tissue between them.

when i thumbed through the square dance book i was instantly taken with the incredibly odd quality of colton's drawings, perhaps mostly because of the strange perspective, as if we are sort of looking down at the dancers from the sky (or at least a small tree...).

colton's drawings immediately brought up some of warhols early works, the dance step patterns, but also simply his use of newspaper images, etc. i think it is somehow connected to translation, or a kind of transformation that took place in warhols works when printed images were enlarged and then silkscreened; and in colton's case, i'm guessing, when ink drawings are made from photographs rather than life.

there's a kind of awkwardness to these drawings, although not really connected to colton struggling to draw, as much as these poses and view seem disconnected from how one would choose to draw them from life. of course, the angle he chose relates to purposeful diagramatics, as opposed to aesthetics (although the strangeness probably oozes from them due to both).

but there is also a stiffness here, that suggests the late paintings of picabia (and i might add that i think late picabia paintings are truly wonderful). there's that feeling as if something uncanny, yet unexplainable, is lurking beneath the surface of these, particularly when taken out of context, and certainly even more so, given the absolutely wonderful text beneath them... (i encourage you to click on them to see them larger...)